Auto open website on Raspberry Pi startup

There are a number of resources on the Web for this, but most are outdated or take the process further than I wanted. To be clear, I don’t want to disable the Pi’s desktop or block the user from using Chrome. I just want the Pi to default to opening Chrome, full screen, to a specified Website URL.

Starting with a Raspberry Pi loaded with Raspbian as is the recommended configuration. You must be connected to the network/internet and I usually turn on SSH and VNC so I can control the device remotely. (You can enable these by clicking Menu > Preferences > Raspberry Pi Configuration > Interfaces)

Now that that is established here is what you need to do to get Chromium to open full screen to a Website of your choice. Open Terminal and type the following.

cd .config

That brings you into the hidden .config directory in the pi users home directory.

sudo mkdir -p lxsession/LXDE-pi

Sudo might not be needed here but this command creates the lxsession and LXDE-pi directories. Many of the currently available resources online assume this already exists, but it does not by default.

sudo nano lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

This command opens the nano text editor with a file named autostart that we will save after typing or pasting the following content.